Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/93

77 Life has, then, reached a serious crisis. A vague transcendent spirituality without content cannot satisfy us. Naturalism, on the other hand, threatens to deprive us of all meaning in life. A refusal to seek an advance from this position is really a decision on the side of negation and hence a further step toward pessimism and dissolution. Eucken is thoroughly convinced that the present must face this either or, and he is trying to arouse a full realization of the position. The problem is a vital one and according to our decision, so will the character of our whole life activity be determined.

Granted the division within life, the question arises as to the possibility of our attaining to such a synthesis. In answering this question, Eucken adopts the view of Hegel that consciousness of limitation indicates in itself transcendence of limitation. In other words, the very keenness with which we experience the division into which life has fallen is living testimony to a deeper unity in life. Our very seeking betrays a depth. "It is plain that there is something higher in us, which we have to arouse to life and realise to its fullest extent. We may be confident that the necessity of our being, which gave rise to the desire, will also reveal some way by which it may be satisfied" (p. 104). On the basis of this optimistic conviction Eucken turns again to life as it presents itself to us, and finds as undisputed fact certain contents and activities that could never arise if man were wholly a product of nature. Genuine creative activity in all departments of life certainly has its source in the impulse toward spiritual rather than toward material self-preservation. The power of ideas, or perhaps better said, ideals is certainly attested by universal history. The conceptions of truth, goodness, beauty disclose to us a new order of reality, and their power over us, in opposition to natural impulse, evidences our recognition of this reality as the primary one. True love, expressed in creative activity with respect to a personal or to an impersonal object, in other words, true material self-forgetfulness, activity proceeding wholly from an inner spiritual necessity, can hardly be altogether denied. But even so, as matters of thought, such conceptions as love, duty, responsibility, freedom, etc., reveal a development of life beyond the limits of nature. The attitude of voluntarily giving up one's life in order to save it indicates in man the presence of a genuine self-determining activity.

Eucken's contention so far then reduces itself to the generally accepted philosophical position that life is not exhaustively described when conceived as a succession of individual experiences aroused by